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Django – dropdown form with multiple select

I need guidance building a django dropdown forms.Form field in which I can select multiple choices. I need to select multiple locations on the office field of the form.

When submitted, the form needs to return a list of the chosen offices (e.g. ["New York", "Los Angeles"] or ["Austin"]). Returning a tuple is also acceptable.

The best I can do right now is build a multipleChoiceField for office with the following:

from django import forms

class my_Form(forms.Form):

    OPTIONS = [
        ("0", "*ALL"),
        ("1", "New York"),
        ("2", "Los Angeles"),
        ]

    office = forms.MultipleChoiceField(
            choices=OPTIONS,
            initial='0',
            widget=forms.SelectMultiple(),
            required=True,
            label='Office',
        )

resulting in this form field layout:

enter image description here

However, I would like this field to be a dropdown, to take up less space on the page.

I found this djangosnippet but (1) a few people have mentioned it appears out of date (I can’t confirm), and (2) I first want to check if a built-in django form/widget setup can fulfill this task before using custom code.

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Answer

“Dropdown” boxes don’t support multiple selection in HTML; browsers will always render it as a flat box as your image shows.

You probably want to use some kind of JS widget – Select2 is a popular one. There are a couple of Django projects – django-select2, django-easy-select – that aim to make it simple to integrate that into your form; I have no experience with either of them.

(And yes, that snippet – like many things on Djangosnippets – is massively out of date; “newforms” was renamed to “forms” even before version 1.0 of Django.)

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